What’s a widget?

I’m sitting here typing my blog while drinking one of my own beers and being annoyed by the incessant roar of antisocial motorcyclists – loud pipes don’t save lives, they just make people think you’re a jerk, especially at 11 on a Wednesday night in a residential neighborhood. Sorry, I digress…

The beer I’m imbibing is Munich Dunkel. It’s a bit disappointing; I was expecting a barleywine. A similar thing happened last night, but brown ale stood in for the anticipated barleywine. Sure the Dunkel and Brown are good beers, but they aren’t barleywine.

Some of you are probably wondering what the heck is wrong with me. The answer is simple: in my rush to unpack my bag on Monday, I failed to label my growlers. It’s amazing how similar they all look after sitting in the fridge for a couple of days.

I thought that I might be able to distinguish them without labels when I first put them away, noting unique identifiers on each vessel: the brown ale has a scratch on the glass, the barleywine handle is at 3 o’clock and so on. 24 hours later, I found myself shining a flashlight through the damn things trying to figure out which beer was which, and guessing wrong two nights in a row!

It reminds me of the early days of the Pump Station, when I tried really hard to make each beer a different color so that the servers wouldn’t mix them up. After a few months, I found it crippling to produce seven diverse beers if only one could be amber. About half the beer styles out there are some shade of amber!

When I finally did yield to reality and started serving multiple amber beers, the servers complained. I explained that it was necessary and they understood. Perhaps it helped that the new amber beers were good, too.

I talked a bit about serving draft beers using nitrogen in the Dry Stout post. I thought it might be interesting to expand on that topic by discussing how the same effect can be experienced in cans and bottles. The technology is colloquially known as the Widget.

40 years after the introduction of their draft stout , the engineers at Guinness introduced the widget, also known as the “In Can System” (ICS) . This simple device, now also found in bottled beer, enables the customer to pour a nitro-beer in the comfort of their own home.

A widget

A Widget is basically a small, hollow plastic container with a really tiny hole. The simplest design is merely a plastic ball. The Widget is placed in a can, followed by carbonated beer, then a drop of liquid nitrogen, and then the lid is affixed to the can. These four steps occur very rapidly on an automated canning line.

As the cold liquid nitrogen warms, it returns to its gaseous phase and the pressure in the can rises to about 24 pounds per square inch (about double that of normal beer). This forces beer into the widget, where it resides until the can is opened.

Upon opening of the package, the pressure in the can is reduced to that of the surrounding atmosphere. The beer in the widget, being under higher pressure than its surroundings, rushes out through the tiny hole. This creates a narrow stream of beer in the container, and this violent stream causes shear that forces carbon dioxide out of solution, forming thick foam.

The consumer pours the very foamy beer into their glass and witnesses the cascading foam that Draft Guinness made famous. After the beer settles, the drinker will notice that the carbonation level is very low; most of the CO2 was knocked out of solution by the violent pour.

Anybody who has read the directions on a package containing a widget knows that the beer is supposed to be served cold. This is because the foaming will be excessive at the warmer serving temperature preferred by many beer geeks. The foam could actually end up in the face of the person opening the can if they are not careful!

In the next week, my goal is to post at least twice, plus I’ll post the answers to the fun word game I posted to hurt the productivity of all my readers. I know a lot of you downloaded it, but did anybody actually solve the whole thing? It seemed easy to me, but I knew the answers in advance.

This widget invention has made the search for stout the way I prefer it far more difficult, but not impossible, as shelf space is given over to the highly touted draft mimicking product. You can keep your foamy headed flat concoctions, give me that good old, very cold, highly carbonated product that can only come out of a pint bottle of Guinness Extra Stout.